SitePoint Supports Australian Fire Relief

The folks at SitePoint.com have put together a sale which benefits both the buyer and the Australian fire relief effort. The devastation down under is extreme and here’s a way to lend a hand while scoring some awesome web design resources.

I have several of SitePoint’s books on CSS, HTML and Javascript and they are excellent. The PDF format books are normally US$29.95 each and well worth the price.

For this sale, SitePoint is offering any five of their PDF format books for a total of US$29.95, essentially an 80% discount. What’s more, they are donating the proceeds from the sale to the Australian fire relief effort. In short, you pay $29.95 and get 5 books and the fire relief fund gets the whole $29.95.

If you have any interest in web development technology, I highly recommend jumping on this deal.

John The Geek

Building An Online Business Takes Commitment

I recently launched a new online business technical training site after a pre-launch period of about three weeks. During that period I did some promotion of the site and had a form on the landing page to collect names and email addresses of those interested in knowing when the site went live.

A total of 78 people opted in and when the site went live, of course, I emailed those folks to let them know. One of those people turned out to be a fellow marketer living about 40 minutes from me. She emailed me to let me know that a few days prior to the site launch.

Launch day came and I got another email from her saying how she was sorry, but she “couldn’t afford [my] prices” and she wouldn’t be signing up for the site. She then went into a long dissertation about how she had to be very careful how she spent her money and how there are lots of scam artists out there and that she had the perfect plan for making her fortune on the Internet.

You ready? Here’s the plan:

1. Put up a squeeze page and collect a bunch of names and emails
2. Get those people to trust her
3. Join an affiliate program and sell the product to her list

Here I’d been working my tail off for almost two years to get this Internet marketing thing figured out and she had it down to three simple steps! Who knew?!?

Obviously, she left out a few details in the master plan, like how she was going to get people to visit her squeeze page and leave their contact info so that she could then convince them she was trustworthy. I wrote back to her and told her that if she already knew how to put up a squeeze page and drive traffic to it she didn’t need my training anyway. I wondered what had prompted her to sign up for my prenotification list in the first place, but decided not to ask.

I had previously asked her what she felt was a reasonable price for online business technical training, but never got an answer. I felt (and still do) the charter membership rate was very reasonable, maybe even too reasonable, but it’s all in the eye of the beholder. I restrained myself from asking her how she expected to build an online business with a mindset that was afraid to spend a few dollars a month for training, but since she apparently doesn’t need training, the point is moot anyway.

The point of this is that I can recall when I first started out and the idea of committing to spending more than a few bucks a month was a little scary. The reason it was scary was that I didn’t know if I was going to generate enough revenue to cover it.

That can be a big hurdle for people to get over. It often entails being willing to go ahead and commit to the monthly expense and trusting that the investment will help the business generate the necessary revenue. It also requires some patience as the cash flow may not increase dramatically, but slowly over time.

The key is to make the commitment and put in the required effort. If it doesn’t pay off, you’ll have learned something and you can go on to the next thing. Chances are, however, if you give it sufficient time to work, the results will be well worth the investment.

John The Geek

Marketing Tech Secrets – Coming Soon!

Yes, this is a blatant plug for my new training site called Marketing Tech Secrets. Hey, if I don’t think it’s worth promoting, who will, right?

Seriously, I’ve made every effort to make Marketing Tech Secrets a valuable resource for Internet business owners and others who want to learn the technical skills necessary to run a web site. There’s nothing secret about any of this stuff, of course, but if you don’t know something, it’s a secret to you!

I’ve noticed in my experience in Internet marketing that a large percentage of people have difficulty with the technical aspects of their web sites. That’s understandable because if you’re not used to dealing with computers and networks and servers and the various services needed to run a business on the Web, it can be daunting.

My intention is to bring my nearly 30 years of professional computer expertise to bear on this problem and help people learn what they need to know to run their web-based business effectively. Whether you’re starting from scratch, or you’ve put up a site or two and want to learn about autoresponders and other tools of the trade, or you’re ready to dive into dynamic pages written in PHP, Marketing Tech Secrets has something for you.

I’ve divided the course into three levels so that you may join at the level closest to your current skill level and not have to sit through all that stuff you already know. You’ll be able to join at Square One if you’re just starting out, Level Two if you’ve got the basics down already, or Advanced if you’re ready to write scripts and dynamic pages to take your sites to another level.

What makes Marketing Tech Secrets unique is that it’s not simply a weekly lesson emailed to you to figure out on your own. Each level of Marketing Tech Secrets will have its own private discussion group where members may ask questions and get the answers they need from their fellow members or me. In short, you have access to my professional experience as much as you want while you’re an active member of Marketing Tech Secrets.

Get all the details and subscribe to our pre-notification list here:

http://MarketingTechSecrets.com

John The Geek